This talk will review the principles and the historical roots of constraint programming (CP). Indeed, understanding the history behind this field helps understand the basic principles it is built on. CP can be traced back to a combination of Artificial Intelligence, Combinatorics (graph algorithms), and programming language design. It took two decades to unify these in a comprehensive and versatile framework shared by all modern CP tools and solvers. We'll review this framework and how it is implemented in recent tools. Last we will relate it and contrast it with mathematical programming.

I could not attend that conference unfortunately, and Paul presented, see the picture John posted on twitter :

Paul also presented a second topic which I recommend:

Practical Application of Constraint Programming Techniques
Paul Shaw

This talk will build on the previous one by presenting a number of techniques that are typically used by CP practitioners to solve problems more effectively. These techniques can be divided into two categories: those which can be applied when modeling the problem, and those which relate to the solving process. Both categories will be explored. Throughout the presentation we will use IBM's constraint programming solver, CP Optimizer, to illustrate how a user would either access or implement these techniques.